e them so delightful to love; as all
those who have had the opportunity of loving in both countries declare.
When a Frenchwoman loves she is metamorphosed; her noted coquetry is
used to deck her love; she abandons her dangerous vanity and lays no
claim to any merit but that of loving well. She espouses the interests,
the hatreds, the friendships, of the man she loves; she acquires in
a day the experience of a man of business; she studies the code, she
comprehends the mechanism of credit, and could manage a banker's office;
naturally heedless and prodigal, she will make no mistakes and waste not
a single louis. She becomes, in turn, mother, adviser, doctor, giving to
all her transformations a grace of happiness which reveals, in its every
detail, her infinite love. She combines the special qualities of the
women of other countries and gives unity to the mixture by her wit, that
truly French product, which enlivens, sanctions, justifies, and varies
all, thus relieving the monotony of a sentiment which rests on a single
tense of a single verb. The Frenchwoman loves always, without abatement
and without fatigue, in public or in solitude. In public she uses a tone
which has meaning for one only; she speaks by silence; she looks at you
with lowered eyelids. If the occasion prevents both speech and look she
will use the sand and write a word with the point of her little foot;
her love will find expression even in sleep; in short, she bends the
world to her love. The Englishwoman, on the contrary, makes her love
bend to the world. Educated to maintain the icy manners, the Britannic
and egotistic deportment which I described to you, she opens and
shuts her heart with the ease of a British mechanism. She possesses
an impenetrable mask, which she puts on or takes off phlegmatically.
Passionate as an Italian when no eye sees her, she becomes coldly
dignified before the world. A lover may well doubt his empire when he
sees the immobility of face, the aloofness of countenance, and hears
the calm voice, with which an Englishwoman leaves her boudoir. Hypocrisy
then becomes indifference; she has forgotten all.

Certainly the woman who can lay aside her love like a garment may be
thought to be capable of changing it. What tempests arise in the heart
of a man, stirred by wounded self-love, when he sees a woman taking and
dropping and again picking up her love like a piece of embroidery. These
women are too completely mistresses of themselv